The Sinking of Karath Dun

Prologue

The Karath Dun has stood between two worlds since before either empire had a name. Travelers who survived its crossing spoke of winds that could strip the flesh from bone, of paths that shifted overnight, of cold so absolute it felt like a presence rather than a temperature. For three centuries, those dangers served a purpose. They kept the Valdric Empire and the Surath Dominion apart — not through diplomacy or treaty, but through the simple, brutal arithmetic of terrain. That arithmetic is changing. The mountains are sinking. Not all at once, not dramatically, but with a slow and terrible certainty that no surveyor can explain and no general can ignore. Where there were once impassable ridges, there are now navigable slopes. Where there were once sheer cliff faces, there are now broad terraces of cracked and tilted stone. Both empires have sent their engineers forward, their supply trains grinding up newly accessible roads, their banners planted in ground that no soldier has ever stood on before. The negotiations that never happened in three hundred years of cold stalemate are now happening at knifepoint, in field tents, between exhausted officers who have never been trained for anything but war. You are here under the seal of the Surveyor's Compact — a neutral party, theoretically protected, practically in the most dangerous place on the continent. Your maps will determine where the borders are drawn, if borders can be drawn at all. But the longer you spend on this sinking ground, the more you feel it: a tremor beneath the tremors, a rhythm beneath the chaos, something vast and old turning in its sleep far below. The mountains are not collapsing. They are being moved aside. And whatever is moving them has not yet opened its eyes.